Employment

Barriers and policy interventions ? The Training Incentive Allowance and the participation of sole parents and Invalids? Benefit recipients in education, training and employment. This review of New Zealand and international literature was undertaken as part of the Training Incentive Allowance (TIA) policy review. The TIA programme has many of the features identified in the literature as success factors for policy interventions designed to overcome barriers to participation in education, training and employment (particularly for sole parents and people with disabilities). The TIA can:
* help people overcome identified financial barriers
* allow for flexible participation in a wide range of training and education
* facilitate access to flexible high-quality childcare.
The TIA can also help in its capacity to be tailored to the needs and capacities of individuals and the labour market, and when it is delivered in conjunction with services including case management, career guidance and job search. By Gill Aimer.

Immigration policy. Perhaps partly because of its apparent simplicity, everyone has a view on immigration. Talk of 'brain drains' or 'immigration invasions' pervades newspapers and radio talkback, depending on whether we have a net outflow or a net inflow of people at any point in time. But the complexity of the impacts of immigration means that the easy answers are seldom the right answers. In this policy briefing we outline the basic economic principles and research findings that lie behind immigration policy. While there are non-economic reasons to encourage certain types of immigration, this note, and New Zealand's immigration regime, focuses on economic migrants. By Hayden Glass.

Will pay equity close the 'pay gap' between men and women. The existence of a 'pay gap', where the average earnings of men are higher than those of women, has resulted in accusations of discrimination in the workplace. The inevitable call for government intervention has followed. The government recently announced the establishment of a taskforce to progress pay and employment equity between men and women in the public sector. This paper seeks to analyse the underlying issues around pay equity. It starts with an examination of the evidence to determine how big the gap really is and whether discrimination is to blame. It then looks at the effectiveness of interventions to address the pay gap. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy approaches to improve earnings of women and what the future is likely to hold. By Justin Coutts.

Employment Relations Law Reform . The similarities between a Council of Trade Union (CTU) submission and the government?s proposed Employment Relations Law Reform Bill were today revealed by the Business Roundtable...